


A Dim Capacity For Wings

by KidA_666



Series: Two Gentle Skulls [1]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alchoholism Ment, Angst (Delicious!), Eventual Rarl, F/F, F/M, I Am A Ron Apologist, I Am An Unashamed Ron Sympathizer, M/M, Multi, PTSD, Parental Abuse, Ron Angst, Ron Deserved Better, Ron Isn't Dead, Ron Redemption Arc, Ron's POV, Season 6 With EXTRA RON, rarl - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-06
Updated: 2016-04-06
Packaged: 2018-05-31 14:56:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6474823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KidA_666/pseuds/KidA_666
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It would have been a mercy if he'd left me to the roamers."<br/>Or, the latter half of season six if Ron Anderson had never pulled the trigger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Dim Capacity For Wings

Rick Grimes is hacking away at the arm of the last thing that was keeping me human.  

Rick Grimes is turning my mother over to the horde in order to save his precious, precious son, where my father would have let me die.

Rick Grimes already killed my father.  

My brother.

My mother.

Let him take me, too; let him finish this.  In this moment, there is nothing left but to go out swinging and screaming--I will not let anyone say that the last Anderson died like a coward.  I scrabble for a gun dropped in the scuffle, all the while training my gaze on Rick-- _you_ , _you._ You did this to us--to me.  

You...you.

⇆

The next time my world expands beyond the single, fixed point of Rick Grimes, it is in the form of his son’s face in close proximity to mine, searching intently for any flicker of life.  

Searching for it, so that he can be the one to snuff it out.  Through the haze of semi-consciousness, I can’t help but smile--it’s poetic, the way things have come full circle.  I killed his father for killing my father and now, enraged in that righteous way of his, Carl Grimes is going to kill me.  I want to ask him how does it feel, prick, now that we’re even; now that he’s lost everything, too, except for that fucking baby; now that he has a reason to despise me, and he can drop his heroically strained facade of comradery.     

He raises a surprisingly steady hand, and I brace myself for a blow that doesn’t come.  His fingers, bloody and calloused, come to rest on my sweat-slick forehead, his other hand reaching tentatively for my wrist, pressing at the pulsepoint.  

“Denise!” His raspy voice is impatient, but not enraged--why, why, why the _fuck_ is he so calm?  “He’s awake!”    

Denise bustles into the room with an ice pack in one hand and a thermometer in the other, business-like; I wonder, dumbfounded, if I’m already dead.  Carl Grimes at my side, accompanied by my dead father’s replacement and the growing pain in my shoulder, for all eternity--this is certainly what hell looks like.  

“Keep the cold compress on his shoulder until he tells you otherwise.  His temperature’s a little lower than I’d like, but well--he’ll live.”  

Carl wrinkles his nose in obvious distaste.   “How long is that going to take?”  

The mingled sounds of activity in the front room and roamers swarming outside of the house swell around me, a dull buzz that crescendoes into a deafening roar as I fully regain consciousness.  In the distance, a gun fires once, twice, a hundred times--it still won’t be enough against the herd.  Carl is rocking on his heels, obviously itching to join the fight, but Denise shuts him down with a brisk _tut_ before showing herself out.  

Resigned to his fate, Carl presses the ice to my shoulder.  I fight the urge to wince, but he still notices, offering up a stony, “Tell me if it gets too cold.”  

None of this is adding up with what I remember.  I had reached for the gun, held it so tightly in my grasp...Rick was right there, defenseless and deranged, and I was sure, so sure, that I had killed him.  

“What the hell happened?”  

Carl looks at me with something akin to pity, and I immediately regret asking him; we both know damn well what _happened_ , but there are certain blank spaces that I need filled in.  

He’s a hick, but he’s not dense; either that, or he simply can’t be bothered to rehash the grisly death of what remained of my family.  “You blacked out.  Hit your shoulder on the way down.  I dragged you here before the walkers could get to you.”  He pauses, sighing.  “Dad and Michonne kept fighting without us.”    

My mind is hung up on the word _Dad_ \--goddammit, god fucking damn it, I should have known better than to think that I could win.  Whatever twisted sense of justice that was beaten into me as a child has failed, defeated by my own overwhelming weakness.  I had set out to kill the father; and now, having failed, I found myself at the mercy of the son.  

Carl Grimes, the very son of a bitch that I had threatened with the same fate, believing for all the world that I would be able to follow through with it if I was only given the _chance_.  I had hated him because of his father, and the way Enid looked at him like she had never looked at me; but that was nothing compared to the slow, smoldering burn that his heroism ignites in my chest.

It would have been a kindness if he’d left me to the roamers.

⇆

I spend two days in the infirmary, memorizing the water stains on the popcorn ceiling.  

Denise ghosts in and out, bearing gifts of ice and aspirin; I hear Carol at the door one morning, dropping off a casserole, chipper as ever; others come and go, but never to the backroom, where I remain sequestered like a rabid dog.  Time ceases to exist, lost to the monotony of the windowless room and Denise’s clockwork delivery schedule.  I lie awake until the sound of Sam’s voice-- _Mom, Mom_ \--begins to tug at the edges of my mind, dragging me into a nightmare until I’m jolted awake by a combination of my own thrashing and Denise’s soothing hand pressed to my injured shoulder; after that, I resign myself to sleeplessness.  

One of the stains on the ceiling is in the shape of a bird with a broken wing.  My mother was always putting birds in her art, but she always said that she could never capture their spirit with ink and paper.  She was going to try sculpting next, had big plans to get it right, before all this--before Rick Grimes.  In my head, I trace the stain a thousand times over, bringing it to life with both wings intact.        

It isn’t until Carl finally disrupts this pattern of aspirin, ice, tracing, repeat that I realize life has carried on around me.

“We’ve been talking,” he says, businesslike, as I finally roll onto my side and acknowledge him.  “You’re coming to stay with us.”

It occurs to me, briefly, to give an honest reply, perhaps something along the lines of ‘I’d rather die, thanks’; but two days without talking has done a number on my throat.  All that I can manage is a grunt.  Taking it as consent, Carl grabs me by the arm and begins steering me bodily towards the door.  I consider screaming for Denise, but she’s gone out, and she’s one of them besides.  There’s even a plastic bag of aspirin on the windowsill, neatly labelled ‘Ron’, so she must have known all along that they were going to do this--traitor.    

Carl maintains a death grip on my arm, leading me as if I were a blind man, and for once, I’m grateful for his touch.  Keeping my eyes trained on my blood-splattered shoes allows me to avoid the sight of my old house, filled to the brim now with the dead.  I would shut my eyes completely if I weren’t expecting to be tripped up by a roamer at any moment; it doesn’t occur to me until later that they must have spent the last two days clearing them out.  

It’s only when Carl stops abruptly in front of one of the houses that I’m forced to look up.  

The white-paneled facade is not unlike that of my own--or what was once my own.  Carl is bounding up the steps, slackening his grip on my arm as he unlocks the door.  Inside, a baby is cooing at his arrival, and Carol is in the the kitchen, mixing cookies with one hand and waving with the other.  

This is what my life was, once.  Mom giving Sam a haircut in the kitchen, Dad swilling a beer on the porch, a bedroom upstairs with a wooden door that locked out the screaming that always started late at night--it wasn’t ideal, but it was home.

Here, I am the interloper.  

Carl pushes me towards the stairs, away from the domestic bliss in the front room, only fully removing his hand from my arm once we've reached the top.  I feel unmoored without it, a castaway ship bobbing in the bay of a foreign shore.  

“Bathroom’s on the right.  Figured you might need a shower.”  

He gestures subtly towards my t-shirt, caked with days-old filth.  Denise must have cut the poncho off when I was still unconscious, but the stench had lingered.  Suddenly, the feel of cloth and skin becomes too heavy; I want nothing more than to take it off, until I’ve peeled back each layer and scrubbed myself clean from the inside out.   

Carl slinks out, although I know he’s on guard on the other side of the door--he’s only playing at hospitality until I give him a reason to do otherwise.  I climb into the shower with every intention of scouring my body with soap, and no idea where to start.  My hair is crusted with dried blood, but so are my hands; the scalding water hisses against my shoulder blades, criss-crossed with roadburn and old scars; gravel is embedded in my scraped knees.  No part of me seems safe to touch.  

There is nothing to do but tip my face towards the hot water, in the desperate hope that it can burn these impurities away until nothing remains but an empty, smiling skull.  

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Emily Dickinson's lovely "My cocoon tightens". The title of the overall series is from Alysia Harris's "Death Poem".   
> Written because Ron Anderson deserved better, and we all know it. This chapter is a lot of exposition/repetition from Ron's POV, but soon it will get to the good stuff I swear! Please enjoy. :)


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